The Bouncing Cups

(I dreamt this one night. I don't believe my words at this time of
writing do the images justice. Picture a black and white noir like
atmosphere throughout except until the very end.)

Nadia was a single headstrong woman. She had three children, and
they were her joy, her everything. There existed a dark aspect: she
lived vicariously through her children, doing things for them, and
making them do things, that she herself was seemingly deprived of in
her childhood.

One day Nadia came up with the idea for the bouncing cups: a
cup-like structure that fit around both legs of a toddler, cushioned
with a bouncy material at the bottom, that could be used to jump and
up and down and move around. This would give a toddler far more
freedom than their developing, and frustrated, legs ever could. The
image I have is of pulling next to her at a traffic stop and seeing
her three children bounce up and down all around as rain splashed on
the windows of her big SUV.

The early warning signs were there (besides her children routinely
not wearing seatbelts). One day, while she was supposed to be
donating the cups to a charitable institution, she started opening the
boxes right in front of everyone and tried, in vain of course, to jump
using the cups (something her mummy wouldn't have approved of at
all). Insisting and indignant that she had a right to try them out
even as security pulled her away as she screamed and fought and her
chauffeur did his best to mediate. Realising they had offended their
hosts severely, they ran back to the car in the pouring rain as she
raged at her distraught surrogate husband to get the cups reloaded
back in and open the door for her in the rain.

The most creative of toddlers could also tumble with these
bouncing cups from the back seat of a car to the front. It was no
surprise that Nadia's toddlers were creative and did this routinely,
with Nadia's encouragement. It was also no suprise that during an
ill-fated trip to the zoo that the door propped open with her children
inside and all three tumbled into the wild animal enclosure.